History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  The inclusion of Germany in the group may raise a few eyebrows, not least in France or Italy, but I think it is vital. Even if Germany only stands in Central Europe “with one leg,” as Havel himself observes, it is the biggest leg in town. There is a lively debate about Germany inside East Central Europe, and there is a lively debate inside Germany about East Central Europe: It is vital that the two debates should intertwine.

  At one point, I ask Havel when he is going to write his fundamental essay about the intellectual and the politician. “Only when I stop being president,” comes the instant reply.

  Back in Prague, I visit another old friend, Petr Pithart, a highly respected opposition intellectual who in 1990 became prime minister of the Czech Republic but is now—with relief—an intellectual again. After working hard to keep Czechoslovakia together, he now finds himself being invited to Belgium and Quebec, to tell them how you make a velvet divorce.

  ON SUNDAY, I drive myself out, along bad roads, through poor, dusty villages—no Prague transformation scenes here—to the castle of Častolovice, in northeastern Bohemia. Diana Phipps—née Sternberg—has had the castle returned to her, under the so-called restitution law. Not so many great families of the Bohemian aristocracy have in fact been eligible for this restitution, because the condition sine qua non is that they were still there at the time of the February 1948 communist coup. Many, seeing the writing on the wall, had already left. Of those eligible, by no means all have reclaimed their property, which often requires a large investment for a very doubtful return. Diana has, with enormous difficulty, gotten back more than seven thousand acres of the estate that originally sustained the castle, mainly forest, with herds of white deer and gruntles of wild boar. But, as for all but a very few country houses or castles in the world today, Častolovice’s future will depend on people coming to see it. Častolovice will be well worth seeing. There is the breathtaking Renaissance Knight’s Hall, the dining room adorned with portraits of all the kings of Bohemia, the library left virtually untouched for forty years, like Miss Havisham’s boudoir in Great Expectations, the rusty old weapons, the furniture (much of it “restituted” from other locations), the ancestral portraits—Diana’s great-grandfather in the full splendor of a general in the service of Emperor Franz Joseph, her father as a dashing dragoon galloping through some Ruthenian hamlet in the First World War; then the “English” park and the boar-filled woods; and all this restored with Diana Phipps’s rare taste and imagination. If you stand with eyes half closed, you can almost see Count Leopold Sternberg’s hunting party lined up in the great courtyard, waiting impatiently for the American ambassador to join them, as described in Cecilia Sternberg’s memorable autobiography, The Journey.

  Here as elsewhere in the Czech lands, the local people do not seem to be overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the return of the aristocrats. (There is perhaps a contrast to the traditional gentry nations of Poland and Hungary.) I personally find it not just fabulous, in the original sense of the word, but also moving. Like, at the other social extreme, Jáchym Topol’s street kids tossing off Albanian slang between bites of crazy chleba, this is all part of the larger return to diversity, to history and to freedom—with all the tensions and conflicts that necessarily brings.

  In the anteroom to the “museum” part of the castle, we contemplate a display, left over from the communist period, listing the successive owners with their coats of arms. The Sternberg arms show a star with the motto “Nescit occasum”—“It will not set.” Underneath, the communist curators have written, “Sternberk family (1694-1948)”—as if the star had set. We discuss how this entry should be amended. Perhaps the simplest and most eloquent thing would be just to add, “(1992-).”

  Warsaw

  In the evening, I fly, with a planeload of screaming French teenagers and wearily networking American, German, and British consultants, to Poland, where it is the ex-communists’ star that has risen again. For me, this is really just a stopover on the way to Lithuania, but there is time to see a few old friends.

  Konstanty Gerbert, who still sometimes uses his underground pen name of Dawid Warszawski, takes me out to lunch in an unexpectedly good Chinese restaurant (culinary worlds apart from the old, state-owned Shanghai). He talks, vividly as ever, about Bosnia, where he now spends much of his time. “But,” I ask, “what about Poland?”

  “Sluchaj, nudnie!” he says. Boring! “Poland has become an ordinary, provincial country with ordinary, provincial problems.” We both agree that this is a very great achievement indeed. After all, until 1989, boring, provincial normality was beyond all but the most far-fetched dreams. And the fact that this can more or less continue to be the case under a government dominated by the ex-communists (or ex-ex-communists) levered out only five years ago is a twist that nobody imagined.

  EVERYWHERE JACKETS AND TIES, suits and ties—scarcely a trace of the old underground sweaters and jeans. I feel almost underdressed.

  GRZEGORZ BOGUTA, once the tyro of the underground publisher Nowa and now the smartly suited head of Polish Scientific Publishers (PWN), gives me the 1992 supplement to their dictionary of the Polish language. It contains words that have entered the language since the dictionary was first published in 1978 and those that had been excluded for political reasons (including reasons of communist prudery). This is a fascinating semantic register of fifteen years in which so much has changed: from aborcja (abortion, one of the most controversial issues in Polish politics over the last few years) to żydokomuna (a hateful new-old term for communists of—or allegedly of—Jewish origin). The entries under B include beton (“concrete,” referring to communist party hard-liners), bingo, bioenergoterapia, bogoojcžyźniany (one of my favorites, meaning literally “god-fatherlandized,” and used to refer to excessively pious patriotic persons), bolszewik, briefing, and broker. V, a letter not generally used in Polish, has just three entries: video (explained as “wideo”), video-(as prefix), and votum separatum.

  Vilnius

  Puttering along in yet another twin-propeller plane, across snow-covered fields, enchanting lakes, and enchanted woods, I arrive in Vilnius. Like Bratislava, this is a capital city that lies in one corner of its country and is in many ways quite untypical of it. Where Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony) was once German, Hungarian, and Jewish as well as Slovak, Vilnius (Wilno, Vilna) was once Polish and Jewish as well as Lithuanian. Memorably evoked in recent times by two of its native sons, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, Vilnius is a wonderful irregular composition of baroque churches, small palaces, and town houses, courtyard leading into courtyard—“a city of clouds resembling baroque architecture and of baroque architecture like coagulated clouds,” as Milosz puts it in his Native Realm.

  However, Vilnius is Central Europe only from the knees up: The pavements and roads are full of Soviet-style potholes and slush. Near the university, I see a car with its rear wheel completely jammed in a three-foot-deep pothole. An acquaintance tells me you can actually get some modest compensation for the damage from the local authorities, but only if you land in a registered pothole.

  A Lithuanian poet shows me around the Jewish museum, which goes by the curious name of the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. The exhibition is striking because, even when you have found it, which is not altogether easy, there is almost nothing there. A few Torah scrolls and Hanukkah lamps, some prints (“Portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore, Lithograph, Warsaw”); that’s about it. Fragments of fragments from a lost world. “We rely on the visitors to tell us what we have,” says the poet. In the visitors’ book, a young German thanks the museum for this reminder of “our very, very bad history.”

  NOT FAR AWAY, on Gedimino Boulevard, there is another exhibition. In the basement of what until just three years ago was still the KGB headquarters, you can visit the cells. I am shown around by a former inmate, Stasys Katauskas. Speaking Polish with the rolled Lithuanian l, he tells me how he was caught in 1946 after passing a radio set to the anti
-Soviet partisans. Then he takes me through the cells as if I myself were being admitted—first the strip search; then locked up in a tiny, windowless cupboard; then the registration, photographing, and fingerprinting (the original equipment is still there); finally, into the cells. These were repainted by the KGB before they left, but the association of former inmates has paid a picture restorer to strip off the paint, layer by layer. On a small, two-foot-square patch, you have twenty carefully numbered layers: So many despairing messages, so much filth, so much blood have these walls seen. Down the corridor there is the freezing solitary-confinement cell and, most horrible of all, a cell heavily padded with stuffed canvas, still bloodstained. The torture room.

  To sophisticated Western ears, Lithuanian nationalism often sounds strident and crude. But if you walk through these cellars, contemplate the catalog of occupation that this one building has seen over the last century—tsarist Russian courts, Polish courts, NKVD, Nazi Sicherheitsdienst, KGB—and look at the grainy photographs of the partisans on the walls, then you may have a little more understanding of the traumatic experience from which that raw, naive nationalism comes.

  However, I am told that, after the first great wave of recollection and mourning and celebration in the independence struggle, most young Lithuanians, perhaps most Lithuanians altogether, no longer want to look back, whether in sorrow, pride, or anger. They have elected former communists to the government after the anticommunist patriots led by Vytautas Landsbergis turned out to be inept. They are more concerned with today’s chances and today’s problems, such as the omnipresent mafia, with their car-theft and protection rackets; the biznes-men who buy politicians and a favorable press; the politicians enriching themselves from the public purse and the proceeds of privatization. (Once again, I feel the lack of a term to embrace this entire complex phenomenon.)

  I VISIT SOME of the politicians in the parliament building which the people of Vilnius defended against Soviet forces in 1991. A section of the concrete and barbed-wire barricade has been left as a memorial, looking strangely like a remnant of the Berlin Wall. Inside, an adviser to the government of ex-communists outlines Lithuania’s foreign-policy options: to take the “northern” route to Europe, via Sweden and Denmark, or the “western” route, by way of Poland and Germany. Interestingly, many Lithuanians favor the northern route mainly because it does not involve going by way of Poland, which is still seen here as a historic oppressor.

  Romualdas Ozolas, a small, wiry, bristling opposition MP, has a sticker on his office wall in the blue and yellow colors of the European Union. It proclaims, “My Country Europe.” Is that his sentiment? “Ja,” he says, in his somewhat broken German, “genau!” And what is Europe? Strutting up and down, he barks a short and definite answer: “Europa ist…nicht-Russland!” “Europe is not Russia.” Well, that is one definition—and far from just a Lithuanian one. (It’s just that the Lithuanians are naive enough to say so.)

  Our wide-ranging geopolitical discussion is interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. A young journalist from the sensationalist newspaper Respublika comes in and, without so much as an “Excuse me,” thrusts a tape recorder under Mr. Ozolas’s nose. Mr. Ozolas delivers a few well-chosen words, and the journalist exits as abruptly as he entered.

  Playing on the popular theme of political corruption, Respublika has offered a large reward to any politician who can prove—against the best efforts of their investigative journalist—that he (or she) is not corrupt. Since politicians have not exactly been rushing to apply, the newspaper has started nominating candidates, allegedly on the basis of a poll of its readers. Mr. Ozolas has been thus nominated. He has just told that probing young Lithuanian Woodward ‘n’ Bernstein that he would not be accepting the kind offer. “Ich sage,” he explains, “ich nicht nehme, weil ich habe Auto gekauft!” After further inquiries, I finally establish that, along with other MPs, he had voted himself a car at what was, in effect, a subsidized price.

  Saint Petersburg

  After a long, cold wait, the Lithuanian Airlines twin-prop just starts up and goes—no safety drill; no “This is your steward speaking.” The emergency exit next to me rattles like a loose mudguard.

  At Saint Petersburg Airport, however, I am met by a Volvo stretch limo and swept into the Grand Hotel Europe—a Swedish-Russian joint venture and luxurious even by Western standards. “No detail has been overlooked,” says the room card, “in creating an authentic Russian environment with all the comforts and services of today.” Authentic Russian environment, my foot!

  The contrast with the city just beyond the hotel doors is extreme. There, poorly dressed crowds trudge grimly along the muddy pavements—although some stop to indulge in that curious Russian pastime of eating ice cream in the snow. The facades look grubbier than when I was last in (then still) Leningrad, but perhaps it is just the season. What is certainly new is the proliferation of street traders, hawkers, con men, and beggars.

  I am here for what turns out to be a fascinating conference, organized by the Hamburg-based Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis with the participation of the German defense minister and the Russian deputy defense minister. Two things strike me particularly. One is that, whereas in Central Europe the central historical reference point is the period before 1939, here it is clearly the period before 1917. This extends even to details of dress and manner. The smart aide-de-camp to the Russian minister looks like an oil painting of a First World War officer. The German military men, by contrast, look like managers in uniform.

  The other, more serious, thing is just how difficult even those whom I know to be very liberal Russians find it, emotionally as much as intellectually, to accept the loss of empire. Although the West in general, and the Clinton administration in particular, has done everything to avoid a Versailles-type humiliation, they still feel humiliated. In this, as in other respects, it really is “Weimar Russia.”

  The crucial psychological test case is not the Baltic states—although Russia’s relationship with them is difficult enough, especially because of the position of the Russian minorities there and the Russian military exclave of Kaliningrad. The test is Ukraine. With the best will in the world, most Russians I talk to find it difficult to accept the idea that Ukraine can really be an independent state.

  One evening we are treated by Mayor Sobchak to a splendid reception in the extraordinary Yusupov Palace, with its rooms of onyx, marble, and tooled leather, its white-and-gold ballroom, and its own small theater, complete with plush stalls, circle, and the family box. After the usual banquet of zakuski, vodka, and speeches, we are shown down to the room in which Prince Feliks Yusupov and his fellow conspirators attempted to poison Rasputin. A wax model of the lubricious monk sits at a table laid with his favorite sweet wine and cakes, while the clean-shaven young prince looks on. A smartly dressed lady guide, exuding perfume and national pride, tells us every last detail of that gruesome night: how the poison was not sufficient to fell the immensely strong Rasputin, how he staggered out into the courtyard, how the conspirators finished him off, how they disposed (or failed to dispose) of the body. His ghost, you feel, has still not quite been laid to rest.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1994

  1 APRIL. Hungary becomes the first postcommunist state to apply for membership in the E U.

  26 APRIL. The United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia form the Contact Group for coordinating policy toward former Yugoslavia. Polish president Lech Wałȩsa visits Lithuania and signs a treaty of friendship and cooperation.

  APRIL. Bosnian Serbs attach, the UN “safe haven” of Goražde. The first NATO air strikes on Bosnian Serb forces are abandoned after Bosnian Serbs threaten UN troops.

  6 MAY. Queen Elizabeth II and President François Mitterrand open the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.

  11 MAY. Silvio Berlusconi becomes prime minister of Italy.

  17-19 MAY. Milan: so rich; so beautiful its women; so stylish its men; so glorious its food. I am here at the invitation
of my publisher, Mondadori, which is owned by Berlusconi, although the politics of the editors I meet are very different from his. They give me a few glimpses of the crisis that has engulfed the whole Italian political system. One tells me, “You know, we in Milan knew there were politicians in Rome, just as we knew that there are wild boar in the forests of Tuscany.” They were strange, remote creatures, southern lawyers and Roman wheeler-dealers. “But now, suddenly, they are real people—even people we actually know.”

  Berlusconi, I am told, started his eruption into Italian politics by conducting extensive and sophisticated opinion polls. Having found out what people wanted, he then offered it to them, wrapped in glittering paper and sold with the latest advertising techniques on the television channels that he owns. It’s almost a parable—or is it a parody?—of contemporary television democracy.

  I am taken to a television chat show that addresses the question of whether there is any connection between the success of the Milan football club, owned by Berlusconi, and his recent triumph in politics. Is politics like football? The presenter, himself of the left, suggests one parallel. Berlusconi’s success in football, he observes, comes from buying players.

  20 MAY. The Crimean assembly approves an effective declaration of sovereignty.

  20-23 MAY. Sintra, Portugal. Byron’s “Eden.” A moorish castle, fantastic villas, and exotic trees, their tops disappearing into the hillside mists. What does this small country, at the westernmost end of Europe, helped on its journey from dictatorship to democracy by the prospect and then the reality of joining the European Community, think of doing the same for the small, fragile new democracies in the eastern mists? The answer, roughly, is “We’d really like to support them, as we ourselves were supported, just so long as it doesn’t take any of the money that we get from the EU.” The money that has, for example, paid for the motorway we drove down on our way from Lisbon.